While DELETING Gigs of data it keeps freezing

Hello experts,
One of our mail servers got hacked and was being used as a relay for tons of spam. We were using mailEnable on the server. We are going to stop hosting the email accounts. My problem is trying to remove the large quantity of mail in the outgoing and bad mail folders. Every time i try to delete it, it seems to just hang for ever. The system resources aren't showing any spikes. I have tried deleting it from reg. windows interface and from the command-line... i have even tried booting into safe mode and deleting from that command prompt with the same results.

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Fact is that a delete operation is very costly and can bring a server to it's knees when deleting thousands of small files... like queued messages.
You will not see much on task mgr, it is just working your hard disk very hard making the machine unresponsive. How well the server handles this all depends on the speed of disk(s) and related hardware.
Best method is to delete from command line in batches based on file naming convention like "delete 200610??.tmp" for example. Or, write a batch file or script.
If you check disk IO is perf mon and even just look at disk activity led you can guage how busy it is.
FS-

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True. It could be an indication of other problems, eg disk caching is turned off in the raid controller etc. Good call running up perfmon, then you can see what is happening _ watch the disc queues, also you could watch I/o byte counters under process for each process.

I would have suggested AV software or the like otherwise but of course in safe mode it is likely that this would not have been running.